


Dream Walker

by shootingstarcipher



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Dark, M/M, Mental Instability, Smut, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 08:44:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11123772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shootingstarcipher/pseuds/shootingstarcipher
Summary: Even dream demons have dreams – but theirs, Dipper realises, are what anyone else would call “nightmares”.





	Dream Walker

Dipper could have sworn there was usually a lock on the inside of the bathroom door – the kind where you slid a bolt across to secure the door’s position, keeping you free from the fear of unwanted intruders barging in while you were in the shower – and that there was no way for the door to be locked from the outside, and yet in that moment neither appeared to be true. His fists stung from being slammed against the wooden panels over and over again and would surely turn black and blue in time, but still he beat wildly at it, screaming to be let out even as he felt his throat dry up and heard his voice become hoarse.

He was so, so close to giving up – to turning away, dropping to the floor and waiting for someone to come and find him, regardless of whether he was still alive by the time they did. But every time he glanced over his shoulder at the mess of red splattered across the porcelain bath, rage ignited inside him and his fury was instantly renewed, closely followed by a surge of determination. He would make it out alive. He’d faced harder tests than this before – demons, monsters, nightmares come to life. He would not be defeated by a simple locked door.

Except it wasn’t just a simple locked door. He already knew that, but it was just so hard to take in he preferred to try and ignore it. Because behind him was a girl, and that girl was lying fully-clothed in the bath, eyes closed, her clothes and body soaked in bloody water. That girl’s throat had been torn open with a weapon he couldn’t find any trace of. There was no doubt that her demise had been a slow and agonising one, and he couldn’t bear to think of it happening to someone as undeserving as she was.

Mabel hadn’t gotten out of there alive, but he would – even if he only lived long enough to find out what had happened to her, it would be worth it.

It was because of his determination to leave the bathroom with his heart still beating that he made the decision to stop beating his fists against the door and momentarily give up on his endeavour. It became clear that, whoever had ended his sister’s life in such a horrific way, was nowhere near ready to leave him alone and would not be letting him out easily. The door remained firmly shut, fixed in place as it stood towering over him. He sank to the floor and immediately started to panic – not as a result of his many failed attempts to free himself, but because he could no longer breathe.

Something hard had clamped shut around his throat. He reached up to snatch at it with both hands, desperately trying to tear it off him. It was leathery, like a belt or something similar, and with each frantic action it became more and fixated on ending his life. He tried to pull it off him, and the strip of leather squeezed tighter. He tried to scream, and it coiled itself around him one more time. Eventually, he stopped trying.

Ignoring the pain as he hit the tiled floor, he closed his eyes and waited. Either the end would come and he would have failed, or the strip of leather would release him from its grip. Half a minute passed and his plan didn’t seem to be working. The leather was still squeezing, his heart was about to burst and it had been a couple of minutes since he’d last taken a breath. A second after that realisation, his mind went blank and everything just seemed to stop, like he had entered a state of non-existence.

That temporary state of non-existence was absolute bliss – but it was, unfortunately, a temporary state. Upon regaining consciousness, although he had no real way of knowing exactly how long he had been in that state for (for lack of any clock or watch in the vicinity), his initial though was that it must have been an extraordinarily long time because the body in the bath seemed to be rotting away already – the water had drained away, his sister’s clothes were torn and ragged, and her bloodied skin was putrid and decayed. His theory was immediately debunked when he stood up and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror – he looked exactly the same as he always did; he felt exactly the same as he had done before; as far as he could see, nothing about him had changed. The strip of leather remained encircling his throat, ready to strike again at any moment.

For a while, he didn’t dare move. Any slight and seemingly innocent motion could have been enough to set off that sickening action of strangulation again and, as he had no way of determining what would set it off, it was safest to simply not move at all. But not moving was never going to help him escape, and in fact it would have been giving in to the monster behind it all without putting up much of a fight.

That is, if there was a monster behind it. There was every chance that he was having a horrible nightmare and would wake up from it – panting and sweating, but safe and well – at any second, but as it felt too real to be a dream concocted by his own mind, he quickly came to the conclusion that if it was a dream, Bill Cipher was the one manipulating it.  
The demon had been pestering him incessantly for several months now – turning up out of nowhere, following him around, creating disturbing mental images and projecting them straight into his mind, forcing him to focus on them no matter how hard he tried to ignore them. Maybe he’d been trying too hard not to acknowledge the demon lately. Maybe that’s why all of this was happening.

He guessed that idea was wrong because the leather strap suddenly tightened its grip, giving a small squeeze to his neck – enough to cause discomfort but not enough to cut off his air supply.

But even after the squeezing ceased, the pain in his neck did not. Every movement (no matter how slight) brought varying degrees of pain and discomfort to his body; even turning his head to look towards the door hurt. His neck was stiff and his limbs quivered in fear, the lack of certainty of his future producing anxious tremors throughout his body.

Doing his best to ignore his sister’s decaying corpse laying in the bath mere inches away from him, he focused his attention on the rest of the room. For whatever reason, that door wasn’t opening. He opened his mouth to scream for help just to be on the safe side, but a sharp jab in his throat quickly had him silencing himself before he’d even began.

Eventually, after examining almost every part of the bathroom (save for the bath, because he couldn’t stand having to stare at his sister’s gory cadaver for more than half a second), he found himself glaring down at a rug that hadn’t been there before. He knew now, looking down at the yellow rug beneath his feet, that he must have been right – Bill was behind it all.

And when the rug suddenly gave way and he was suddenly falling, down past the cavern of nothingness that seemed to reside below the rusted, ominous bathroom, more evidence supporting this theory was uncovered. Because when he finally crashed to the golden floor below, he lifted up his head to stare at the face of the monster he hated most – Bill Cipher, his single eye gleaming maliciously as his lips curled into a grin.


End file.
